Book Review: Parvus.The World Market and the Agricultural Crisis

Written:Written in February 1899Published:Published in March 1899 in the magazineNachalo,[1]No. 3.

      Signed:Vl. Ilyin.

      Published according to the text in the magazine.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1964,

      Moscow,Volume 4,

      pages65-66.Translated:Transcription\Markup:R. CymbalaandD. WaltersPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2003).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.

Parvus.The World Market and the Agricultural Crisis.Economic essays. Translated from the German by L. Y. St. Petersburg,
	1898. Publ. 0. N. Popova (Educational Library, Series 2,
	No. 2). 142 pp. Price 40 kopeks.

Thisbook, by the gifted German journalist who writes under the pseudonym
      of Parvus, consists of a number of essays describing some of the phenomena
      of modern world economy, with the greatest attention paid to
      Germany. Parvus’ central theme is the development of the world market and
      he describes mainly the recent stages of this development in the period of
      the decline of England’s industrial hegemony. Of the greatest interest are
      his remarks on the role being played by the old industrial countries that
      serve as a market for the younger capitalist countries: England, for
      example, swallows up an ever-growing amount of German manufactured goods
      and at the present time takes from one- fifth to a quarter of the total
      German export. Parvus employs the data of commercial and industrial
      statistics to describe the peculiar division of labour between the various
      capitalist countries, some of whom produce mainly for the colonial market
      and others for the European market. In the chapter headed “Towns and
      Railways” the author makes an extremely interesting attempt to
      describe the most important “forms of capitalist towns” and
      their significance in the general system of capitalist economy. The
      remaining and greater part of the book (pp. 33-142) is devoted to
      questions concerning the contradictions in present-day capitalist
      agriculture and the agrarian crisis. Parvus first explains the influence
      of industrial development on grain prices, on ground rent, etc. He then
      outlines the theory of ground rent developed by Marx in Volume III ofCapitaland explainsthe basic cause of capitalist agrarian crises from the stand point of this
      theory. Parvus adds data on Germany to the purely theoretical analysis of
      this question and comes to the conclusion that “the last and basic
      cause of the agrarian crisis is increased ground rent due exclusively to
      capitalist development and the consequent increased price of land.”
      “Eliminate these prices,” says Parvus, “and European
      agriculture will again be able to compete with the Russian and American.”
      “Its [private property’s] only weapon against the agrarian crisis
      is, with the exception of fortuitous favourable combinations on the world
      market, the auctioning of all capitalist landed properties”
      (141). The conclusion drawn by Parvus, therefore, coincides, by and large,
      with Engels’ opinion; in Volume III ofCapitalEngels pointed to
      the fact that the present-day agricultural crisis makes the ground rents
      formerly obtained by European landowners

      impossible.[2]We
      strongly recommend to all readers who are interested in the questions
      mentioned above to acquaint themselves with Parvus’ book. It is an
      excellent reply to the current Narodnik arguments on the present
      agricultural crisis which are constantly to be met with in the Narodnik
      press and which suffer from a most essential shortcoming: the fact of the
      crisis is examined in disconnection from the general development of world
      capitalism; it is examined, not from the stand point of definite social
      classes, but solely for the purpose of deducing the petty-bourgeois moral
      on the viability of small peasant farming.

Thetranslation of Parvus’ book, can, on the whole, be considered satisfactory,
      although in places awkward and heavy turns of speech are to be met with.

[1]Nachalo(The Beginning)—a monthly literary
      and political magazine that was published in St. Petersburg during the first
      months of 1899 by “legal Marxists”; its editors were P. B. Struve,
      M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky, and others. It published articles by G. V. Plekhanov,
      V. I. Zasulich, and others. The magazine was closed down by the tsarist
      authorities in June 1899.

[2]Karl Marx,Capital, Vol. III, 1959, pp. 708-10.